Finally “Friday”

If you’ve used the Internet at all in the past week or so, you’ve almost definitely seen this video or some “news” story related to it. Afterward you probably wondered, “BlogDailyHerald is usually so up to date on all the absurd web trends; why haven’t they posted something about Rebecca Black, the 13 year-old girl whose music video is pushing 16 million views on YouTube?” (Yes, Brown students think with semicolons.) The truth is, here at the blog we often try to find some relevant context for our posts, and the past six days just haven’t provided it. Luckily, today i-is Friday (Friday) and thus it’s appropriate to join the meme-addicted multitudes in giving Rebecca the attention she probably doesn’t deserve. The Daily Beast recently posted an interview with Black and she’s as profoundly insightful as we expected her to be. Analysis of every Rebecca quotation in the interview after the jump.

On critical YouTube comments: “At times, it feels like I’m being cyberbullied” Cyberbullied–now kids have to worry about getting made fun of on the Internet!? This word seems to be embedded in the jargon of children born after 1996 (and their overly concerned parents), but will it find longevity like google the verb, or is it just a fad for moms with kids too young to join MADD? Only time will tell. Unfortunately for Rebecca, this is not a case of cyberbullying. As any superstar (or sociologist of fame) can confirm, those venomous words are just a part of celebrity. So we say to you in the immortal words of Tony Perkis: “deal with it.”

On the content of “Friday”: “‘Friday’ is about hanging out with friends, having fun. I felt like it was my personality in that song” If this is true, she should probably get checked out for multiple personalities if she is both a 13 year old Selena Gomez lookalike and an obscure black rapper (see 2:30 in the music video). Also, I’m not sure she should be happy if personality, to her, means detail-by-detail stream of consciousness narrative of her morning in the style of Lil’ B the Based God.

On the second song she recorded: “The other song was about adult love–I haven’t experienced that yet” Certainly a fraction of the 16 million viewers on YouTube are adults of a certain perverse persuasion who love nothing better than to help Rebecca better understand the lyrics to that song…

On keeping the video up despite excessive criticism: “I decided not to give the haters the satisfaction that they got me so bad I gave up” Way to go Rebecca! Such empowered words could only have been a result of listening to Madonna’s Gaga’s new anthem “Born this Way.” Yet, it’s very unlikely that she was born caked in makeup, permanently smiling and speaking in perfectly pitched autotune (everyone knows only T-Pain has the gift of an autotuned larynx). Side note: Despite keeping the video up, her record label has tended to mark the majority of comments as spam.

Hate it or love it, Rebecca Black is here to stay for another five to ten days, though there is the distinct possibility that she’ll have another song out very soon–conventional wisdom suggests that lyrics that don’t rhyme or make sense tend to require a creative process of roughly 10 minutes. Now, let’s all get excited for Friday.